If you’ve been feeling confined around your current kitchen stove, it might be time to upgrade. Standalone gas cooktops not only offer you more surface space to work with, but can free up the layout of your kitchen in ways that a traditional range simply can’t. With a standalone cooktop, you can put your cooking station wherever in the kitchen you’d like (as long as you can run a gas hookup to it!), as opposed to only where you can fit an entire range. In a big kitchen, you can even double down and have both, allowing you to swap between gas and electric based on your taste. If you already spend a lot of time in your kitchen, consider an upgrade or addition to your space with a gas-powered cooktop and feel like a restaurant professional at home.
Cooking a big meal is always a balancing act, juggling many pots and pans with only a couple burners to cook them all on. Different dishes require different temperatures and times to cook thoroughly and evenly, making coordinating even a regular evening meal hectic, let alone a Christmas dinner or big family brunch. Double your available cooking surface space by adding a second, separate cooktop on top of your existing range so that you aren’t waiting twenty minutes for your side dish to finish and free up stove space before you can start cooking your entree.
Why Gas?
Using gas burners can help speed up the cooking process, because a direct gas flame rises to temperature instantly, rather than taking time to heat up like an electric coil. Gas burners also give you better temperature control while you’re cooking, responding immediately to adjustments and stopping heating entirely when turned off, where electric burners slowly raise and lower in temperature and take time to cool down. Gas burners are also a little more forgiving. Where even a slight imperfection in a pan’s shape can make it cook unevenly on an electric cooktop, it doesn’t make a difference with gas so long as the flame is unhindered. Gas burners also are less costly over time to run and work even during a power outage.
You can even install a cooktop directly onto your kitchen island, creating a cooking station that’s back to back with your kitchen sink for added convenience. You also will feel more engaged in activity around the kitchen by cooking in the middle of the room instead of in the corner, and can direct helping hands better for meal preparation. Not to mention, standing in front of a heating oven while stirring four pots can be hot and overwhelming. Space out this heat throughout the kitchen with your oven and cooktop in different areas instead of concentrated in one place.
While gas cooktops are great and seen as more luxurious than electric ones, gas ovens can’t boast the same. They tend to heat unevenly and require more careful watch and rotation to avoid a half-baked, half-burned dish. Gas ovens also can’t roast as well as their electric counterparts, because the heat they produce is slightly moist rather than intense and dry, like electric heat. Having a separate cooktop from your oven means you can get the benefits of both gas and electric cooking without compromising on a single range.
There are little, everyday benefits to upgrading to a gas cooktop as well. The close burners allow you to more evenly heat a griddle plate on top of the stove without requiring an additional griddle appliance, and with very little space between the burner grates, you can easily slide pots and pans between burners without having to pick them up and risk a painful spill.
Whether you have a high demand at meal time or host a couple holiday events, a separate cooktop can bring ease into cooking that lets you make many dishes without the struggle of juggling burners for a more professional kitchen.
